The prevalence of digital image capturing devices such as digital cameras and mobile phones equipped with camera capability, coupled with increasing popularity of Web posting, allow people to post their photographs (hereinafter referred to as photos) on the Web for sharing with others. Many websites allow people to add tags to photos in order to make it relatively easy to organize and share large number of photos. Tags allow people posting photos on the Web to add contexts to photos, as people can organize the photos better as well as communicate with their friends and families with the tags. Some of these tags are considered as geo-tags and adding a geo-tag to a photo is known as geotagging.
Geotagging is a process of adding geographical identification information, or metadata, to various media such as photos. A geo-tagged photo usually has geographical identification information including the latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates of the location where the geo-tagged photo was captured. The geographical identification information of a geo-tagged photo may be either recorded automatically by the digital image capturing device at the time the photo was captured or entered manually by a person when posting the photo on a website. Geotagging can help one to find photos taken near a given location by searching with latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates on the Web.
Given the ever-increasing number of photos being posted on the Web, it is not easy to search and organize photos even though the photos may be geo-tagged. With a large number of photos, it is also time-consuming to organize the photos taken from a trip as a sequence of photos captured at various locations visited during the trip. Accordingly, there is an ongoing need to improve techniques for mining geo-tagged photos and reconstructing sequences of memorable moments and scenes, such as trips, from geo-tagged photos.